Page 46 of Tending the Ache

The corridor narrows around him, stone on both sides, and his breath is a thin ragged thing that comes back off the vaulted ceiling. His hands are shaking. All of him is shaking, the fine clinical tremor of adrenaline flooding a system that learned through years of repetition that the sound of authority comes before pain.

Then he hears the footsteps.

Heavy and fast, a stride twice the length of his own closing the distance in half the steps, boots striking stone with purpose, and the fear goes through him white and cold and total. Every lesson his body ever learned fires at once. Run faster. Find a door. Make yourself small. Do not let him catch you in the open.

A hand closes around his arm.

Indrie locks. The grip is careful but firm, fingers wrapped just above his elbow, holding without crushing, and he flinches hard enough that his teeth click together and his whole frame jerks sideways.

Then Eskil pulls him against his chest.

Both arms come around him, one across his shoulders and one at his back, and Indrie is pressed into the broad solid warmth of him and held there, enclosed. He can feel the heat through the tunic. The rise and fall of breathing. A heartbeat against his temple, going too fast.

Indrie freezes.

He stands in Eskil's arms and he cannot breathe. His lungs have locked with the rest of him. His hands hang at his sides, fingers splayed, not pushing away and not holding on. Evening light falls through the high narrow windows in pale slats across the floor. Somewhere in the keep a door closes and someone's steps fade, and then there is nothing but two people breathing, one steady and one not.

"I'm sorry."

Eskil's voice is low and scraped raw, pulled taut over something it costs him to say, and the words come from directly above Indrie's head, spoken into his hair. "I'm sorry. That was — I shouldn't have —"

He stops. Draws a breath Indrie feels expand against his own chest. Tries again.

"I can't let you run from me again."

Indrie has never heard him say anything in that register.

"Last time I was too proud to follow." His arms tighten a fraction, a reflex, and then hold where they are. "On the ship. I stood in that cabin and let you go and told myself it was the right thing. Giving you space. Instead of admitting I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."

His voice catches, a small sound, barely there. Indrie has spent his life listening for exactly that kind of sound and knowing where to look for what is underneath it.

"It was a mistake I won't make again," Eskil says, muffled against Indrie's hair.

Indrie stands very still. The shaking has not stopped, but it has changed. The rigid frozen quality is going out of him, the locked muscles releasing one at a time. Eskil's arms are warm and steady and they do not tighten further. They do not demand. They hold.

Slowly, so slowly it is almost nothing, Indrie's shoulders drop. His spine uncurls a fraction. His forehead settles against Eskil's collarbone and he lets it rest there, lets the weight of his head be held by something other than his own neck. His fingers have unclenched. The breath that comes into him next is deeper than the ones before it, shaking but full.

"I am shit at this." Eskil says it plainly, without self-pity. He has spent his whole life learning to lead armies and hold borders and no one ever taught him this. "Morgan will tell you the same. Ask him. He'll give you a list."

A sound escapes Indrie. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sob, and it catches in his throat and stays there.

"But I can't —" Eskil pauses. His jaw shifts against the top of Indrie's head. "I can't see you hurt. Do you understand? I can't. It's the one thing I —"

He does not finish. The arms around Indrie say the rest.

Indrie swallows.

"I understand," he says.

His voice is small and hoarse and unsteady, and it is his own. It is not the thing that said yes, your majesty.

Eskil's breath goes out of him in a long slow exhale. He holds on a moment longer, two, three, and then his arms loosen. Not all at once. By degrees, giving room, letting Indrie decide whether to stay or go.

Indrie pulls back. Not far. Just enough to see him.

He dares to look up, and the looking is its own small straightening, because something in him newer than the fear and younger than the flinching already knows what he will find there, and it is not what his body expects.

Eskil's face is open in a way Indrie has never seen it. The stone is gone. The kingship is gone. What is left is grey under his eyes and a tightness around his mouth and an expression Indrie recognizes, because he has seen it in his own mirror on the mornings after the bad nights. Harm done, and known, and past undoing.